Evening Edition

The rebels’ advance five days ago to the outskirts of the small town of Bir al-Ghanam had raised the possibility of a breakthrough in a four-month old conflict that has become the bloodiest of the “Arab Spring” uprisings.

Rebel fighters who had been massing on a ridge near Bir al-Ghanam and preparing for an attack were now pulling back under fire from Russian-made Grad rockets, said a Reuters photographer in Bir-Ayyad, 30 km to the south.

Some governments have already questioned whether France’s action contravenes an arms embargo imposed by the U.N. Security Council in February. Russia called it a “crude violation.”

France argues that a later Security Council resolution authorizing the air war also created an exception in the arms embargo for weapons needed to shield civilians.

France confirmed on Wednesday that it had air-dropped arms to rebels in Libya’s Western Mountains, becoming the first NATO country to acknowledge openly arming the insurgency against Gaddafi’s 41-year rule.

France, Britain and the United States are leading a three-month-old air campaign which they say they will not end until Gaddafi falls. The war has become the bloodiest of the “Arab Spring” uprisings sweeping North Africa and the Middle East.

The long-awaited indictments will embolden the opposition led by Hariri’s son, Saad, whose unity government was toppled by Hezbollah and its allies in January after he refused demands that he renounce the tribunal.

However, analysts say the increased tension is unlikely to turn violent or lead to a repeat of the 2008 sectarian clashes in which at least 85 people were killed and which brought the country to the brink of another civil war.

Opinion polls ahead of Sunday’s election favor the opposition Puea Thai (For Thais) party led by Yingluck Shinawatra, sister of ousted premier Thaksin Shinawatra, the figurehead of the rural and urban poor “red shirts” whose protests last year ended in a bloody army crackdown.

The telegenic 44-year-old businesswoman has electrified supporters as Thailand’s first possible elected woman prime minister, vowing to revive Thaksin-style populist policies ranging from a minimum wage hike to subsidies for farmers.

“We hope the new elected government will keep fiscal discipline and adopt a lower budget deficit than the previous year in order to achieve a balanced budget in five years,” he told reporters.

Thailand holds a general election on Sunday, July 3. The two leading parties are both promising big infrastructure projects and populist policies such as energy subsidies, which economists say could push up inflation and state spending.

Iran has crushed attempts to reignite Green movement protests that erupted after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, even as protests have swept presidents from power in Egypt and Tunisia and sparked violence in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain.

Ebadi, a human rights lawyer who was the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel peace prize in 2003, said Iran’s Green movement had not been beaten and said the country wanted to avoid the sort of conflict that has engulfed Libya.

The kingdom, which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, has accused its majority Shi’ite population of leading pro-democracy protesters according to a sectarian agenda backed from Shi’ite power Iran, across Gulf waters.

In March, Bahrain’s Sunni rulers imposed emergency law, inviting Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to send troops and tanks into the island as local forces cleared the streets of protestors.

The party, which says it is non-violent but is accused by some analysts of seeking a coup in Islamabad, added that “powerful factions” in Pakistani society including the military should also take part, but violence had no place in its work.

Hizb ut-Tahrir won international attention when Pakistan’s army said on June 22 it was questioning four majors about alleged links to the party, following the arrest in May of a brigadier suspected of having such ties.

The COSATU labor federation expressed frustration at a strategy meeting this week at being marginalized by Zuma, despite having helped him win leadership of the African National Congress and the presidency, held by the ANC since 1994.

“Help us help you. We don’t like the space we are in now,” COSATU’s general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said on the sidelines of the meeting.

Witnesses said Saleh opponents packed Sixty Street to listen to a Muslim preacher urge acting President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to do more to end a standoff over demands that Saleh quit to allow Yemenis to chose a new leader.

“We have sacrificed all what we own, you should sacrifice what you can,” the preacher said, addressing Hadi.

For many Afghans, the situation in the capital is a gloomy reminder of the turbulent years leading up to the Soviet retreat in 1989 and the chaotic, dirty civil war that followed.

They fear the buzzword on the lips of foreign diplomats and the military, “transition,” is little more than a public relations tactic to cover a polite rush to the exit, that they have seen before.

On Radio Mosaic, the North African country’s most popular radio station, it’s daily sketch time when comedian Migalo ribs not just ousted Tunisian leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, but all of the Arab leaders fighting for survival in the ‘Arab Spring’.

This week, Ben Ali and Yemen’s beleaguered leader Ali Abdullah Saleh, both now in Saudi Arabia, are arguing about the housework.

The five-member panel of human rights and legal experts, unveiled ahead of a national dialogue set to start on Saturday, is part of Bahrain’s efforts to restore its image after its Sunni rulers cracked down on demonstrations led mostly by the Shi’ite majority in February and March.

“We will ask for files, we will go to the prisons,” said panel chairman Cherif Bassiouni, an Egyptian-American law professor and U.N. war crimes expert who was involved in the formation of the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) and recently headed a U.N. inquiry into events in Libya.

Running out of foreign currency, Belarus last month devalued its rouble by 36 percent, triggering price hikes and panic on the consumer market.

Angered by runaway inflation, hundreds of Belarussians have gathered for weekly rallies in cities this month, coordinating timing and locations through social networking websites.

The United States was behind the curve of Arab world politics as popular uprisings swept its secular, autocratic allies from power in Tunisia and Egypt and others in Libya and Yemen saw bloody rebellions against their decades-long rule.

Acknowledging groups whose views resonate most among Arab voters, even if those views can contradict Western liberal values, could help the U.S. regain the initiative and ensure its influence still holds if Egypt’s democratic project succeeds.

More than 4,000 people across Europe and in North America have been infected in the deadliest outbreak of E. coli so far recorded, which started in early May. Almost all of those affected lived in Germany or had recently traveled there.

The German outbreak and a smaller cluster of E. coli centered around the French city of Bordeaux have both been linked to sprouted seeds.

Holder said he accepted the recommendations from Justice Department prosecutor John Durham, who has been conducting an inquiry into harsh CIA interrogation practices of terrorism suspects during George W. Bush’s presidency.

Holder said Durham examined possible CIA prisoner abuses in the interrogation of 101 prisoners in U.S. custody after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and determined that only the two deaths required further criminal investigation.

Sgt. Kenneth Bowen heard him and answered “that he had kicked the guns off the bridge,” Hills told jurors in a New Orleans courtroom on Thursday.

So began a web of deceit, federal prosecutors say, that stretched for years after the slaying of two civilians by police in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Four others were injured in the September 2005 shooting.

Lawmakers voted 155-136 for the implementation laws a day after backing a deeply unpopular 28 billion euro, five-year austerity plan, removing the last obstacle to the next slice of aid from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

The euro and world stocks rose to three-week highs after the vote as investors expressed relief that the specter of a sudden summer default had been avoided, despite fierce public opposition to deeper pay and spending cuts.

The impasse means around 23,000 of roughly 36,000 state employees will be furloughed, and all but the most critical state functions suspended. Parts of the government had already begun to shut down on Thursday ahead of the midnight deadline.

State parks and campgrounds have closed ahead of what is usually their busiest stretch of the year for the July 4 holiday, and dozens of highway rest stops were shut down for one of the biggest travel days of the year.

“We gave the administration fair warning on this,” said Senator Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, referring to the fight over the Trade Adjustment Assistance program.

“We made it clear time and time again that we would not stomach attaching a program as big as this on to these agreements. The president knew where we stood and he decided to ignore those who don’t agree with him,” he told reporters.

The deal would cover the country’s borrowing needs for seven months, the aide said. That would theoretically include budget savings of roughly $1 trillion to attract the Republican support needed to pass it through Congress.

Congress must raise the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling by August 2 to avoid a default that could push the United States back into recession and send financial markets plummeting.

“At some point, they’ve got to sit down and talk turkey. This is too big to be handled just on the cost side of the ledger or just on the revenue side of the ledger,” said Bill Frenzel, a former Republican congressman who specializes in budget and tax policy at the Brookings Institution.

The political stakes are high for President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner who risk alienating their core supporters with spending cuts or tax increases that go too far as they try to cut a $1.4 trillion budget deficit.

Colbert, who presents himself as a conservative pundit on his late-night cable TV show and has mocked the infusion of corporate money into U.S. political campaigns, emerged to cheers from supporters outside the agency’s headquarters.

Asked what message he was sending to big corporations, the comedian said: “None. I want their money.”

Geithner said he would remain in his Treasury post “for the foreseeable future” and sidestepped a direct question about his career plans after a flurry of media reports that he was mulling leaving the Obama administration.

“I’ve only worked in public service. I live for this work. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done, I believe in it,” Geithner said. “We have a lot of challenges as a country, and I’m going to be doing it for the foreseeable future.”

Speaking on the final day of the Fed’s latest bond-buying initiative, James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, pronounced the purchases, which have totaled $2.3 trillion in all, successful in easing financial conditions.

“This experience shows that monetary policy can be eased aggressively even when the policy rate is near zero,” he said at a St. Louis Fed conference evaluating quantitative easing.

Thirty banks, hedge funds and other creditors agreed in writing to support the Chapter 11 plan filed earlier this week by what remains of the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, Lehman said on Friday.

Lehman said the creditors include “substantially all” supporters of two competing reorganization plans. Among these are the hedge fund firm Paulson & Co, Goldman Sachs Group Inc and hedge fund firm Silver Point Capital LP.

Cutillo’s name featured prominently at a trial that ended on June 13 with the conviction of three traders on securities fraud and conspiracy charges brought by federal prosecutors in New York in a crackdown on insider trading at hedge funds.

Cutillo said at his plea proceeding in January that he received $32,500 in cash for providing inside information to trader Zvi Goffer about merger activity involving computer network equipment maker 3Com Corp and Canadian drug company Axcan Pharma Inc in 2007.

The lowest marks in the survey released today by J.D. Power and Associate went to the self-directed units at bank-connected brokerages: Wells Fargo Investments/Wells Trade, owned by Wells Fargo & Co. and Merrill Edge, owned by Bank of America Corp..

The discount brokers not tied to full-service banks did relatively well, with broad satisfaction reported for companies like USAA, Scottrade and Charles Schwab.

One of the BlackBerry’s main selling points has been Research in Motion’s top-tier security and management features, which appeal to IT managers eager to control what workers do with corporate information and protect business systems from cyber attacks.

But with companies such as Good Technology and MobileIron offering applications that could untether IT managers from their BlackBerrys, analysts say that consumer-market pressures could intrude into RIM’s mainstay corporate market.

Following a three-hour bargaining session between the NBA and National Basketball Players Association, both sides walked away from the table far apart on several financial issues and the players opposed to a new salary cap system.

“It’s with some sadness that we’re going to recommend this to the (labor relations) committee because a lockout has a very large impact on a lot people, most of whom are not associated with either side.” NBA Commissioner David Stern told reporters after meeting with the union in a midtown Manhattan hotel.

Last-ditch talks with the league’s owners collapsed on Thursday, according to the players’ union, with the two sides far apart on issues ranging from salaries to revenue sharing. The expiration of their current agreement is just hours away.

The costs of a lockout could be enormous, particularly if the entire season were lost. In that case, the league’s most valuable franchises, including the New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers, stand to lose more than $200 million each in revenue, according to estimates by Forbes.

The feisty 73-year-old who brings a former seminarian’s zeal to environmentalism sees green jobs reinvigorating the economy and restoring California’s position as world leader in clean energy.

Never mind budget gaps, technology gaps or the political gap that will come as the state legislature’s champion of alternative energy is termed out of office.

One company bucking the offshoring trend by bringing jobs back home is Los Angeles-based Karen Kane, which sells women’s clothing — primarily dresses — in department stores like Nordstrom and Dillard’s.

The privately held company is shifting 80 percent of its production to Southern California from China as manufacturers take a second look at the true costs and complications related to traditionally low-cost foreign labor markets.

A research team led by Stanford University scientists examined four premium wine-growing counties in the West.

Those were Santa Barbara County and the Napa Valley in California, Yamhill County in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and Walla Walla County in Washington state’s Columbia Valley.

General Motors Corp announced plans this week to develop its first natural gas-powered engine, overcoming its long aversion to alternative fuels and joining a host of smaller players working to put natural gas in car engines.

In Indianapolis, Marlon Kirby has built a new supercar that looks much like all the others – sleek, curvy, low to the ground – but which differs from its gasoline-guzzling counterparts in one major way: it runs on liquid natural gas.

The Llano River was dangerously close to drying up as Texas faces a punishing and record-breaking drought. Residents of this Hill Country town west of Austin depend on the river for their entire water supply.

It neared zero flow this week, and the city was looking at trucking in water from 20 miles away, when city leaders employed the old-fashioned “witching” technique to strike water in the limestone bedrock near the city’s water treatment plant.

Geologists say an 82-acre piece of earth on Little Porter Mountain in Keene Valley, New York, is creeping downhill at a rate of between just six inches and two feet per day, dragging boulders, trees and house foundations along with it.

Andrew Kozlowski, associate state geologist at the New York State Museum, said the uncommonly lazy slide was triggered by excessive groundwater from this year’s heavy snows and rain.

The resulting spaceship had 2.5 million parts and was nine times faster than a speeding bullet as it climbed heavenward. It was the first reusable spacecraft, capable of gliding back to Earth like an airplane.

“It was leading-edge stuff back then,” said NASA Chief Historian Bill Barry. “It was seen as a major leap forward.”

The federal government says it plans to launch a program to kill or otherwise remove hundreds of barred owls — originally from the East Coast — that are overtaking the spotted owl’s natural range in Washington state, Oregon and northern California.

The proposal to thin barred owl populations in old-growth forests favored by their native cousins is a key component of a broader recovery plan unveiled for the spotted owl Thursday, outlining how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service intends to stem its decline.

The results add to evidence that, despite laws in some cities mandating calorie counts on fast-food menus, nutritional information makes little difference to people when they are eating out.

“Although it is important to inform consumers about the nutritional characteristics of the food offered, providing nutrition information in less healthy food environments such as fast-food restaurants is unlikely to alter consumers’ food choices,” wrote Christine Hoefkens and Dr. Wim Verbeke, two authors of the study, in an email to Reuters Health.

Babies with a family history of allergies to foods or environmental allergens who were fed Nestle’s NAN Hypoallergenic whey product after they stopped breastfeeding were just as likely to develop allergies later as children who were fed milk or soy formulas, researchers report in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Epidemiology.

The “findings do not support the recommendation that (the whey formula) should be used after breast-feeding as a preventive strategy for infants at high risk of allergic diseases,” wrote Adrian Lowe and colleagues at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia.